High-performance electromagnetic (EM) wave absorbing materials are strongly desired in many fields like portable devices and aircraft. Introducing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to certain materials has been proved to be an effective method leading to good EM wave absorption capability. In this work, CNTs are successfully synthesized on SiC fibers with high speed by using a newly developed method which is far more efficient than the commonly used one. The obtained CNT/SiCf composites exhibit high-performance EM wave absorption capability. With 0.72 wt % CNTs, the reflection loss of the 4 mm composite with only 20 wt % filler loading reaches −62.5 dB with the broad effective absorption bandwidth of 8.8 GHz, covering almost the entire Ku band and three-quarters X band. Moreover, the composites can be added to varying matrices so as to modify their EM wave absorption and other properties. The EM wave absorption performance can be easily tuned in a wide range by varying the CNT content, thickness, and filler loading. This work offers a new route for efficiently synthesizing CNTs but, more importantly, for designing high-performance and multifunctional EM wave absorbing materials.

Lithium aluminum silicate (LAS) nanoparticles have been successfully loaded on graphene nanosheets by adding a silane coupling agent KH-550 by sol–gel process, hydrothermal reaction, and heat treatment process. By regulating the complex permittivity of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) by LAS nanoparticles and KH-550, LAS/rGO-KH-550 possesses excellent microwave absorption performance. The maximum reflection loss of LAS/rGO-KH-550 reaches −62.25 dB at 16.48 GHz with thickness of only 2.7 mm, and the widest bandwidth is up to 6.64 GHz below −10 dB. The LAS/rGO-KH-550 has effective absorption (99.9%) below −20 dB at all X and Ku bands (8–18 GHz). Also, the added quantity of composites in the paraffin matrix is only 20 wt %. The results demonstrate that the interfacial polarization, the Debye dipolar relaxation, the well-matched characteristic impedance, and the quarter-wavelength matching all play important roles in improving the microwave absorption properties of LAS/rGO-KH-550 nanocomposites. Consequently, the LAS/rGO-KH-550 nanocomposites can be readily applied as an ultra-wide-band, light weight, and ultra-high-performance microwave-absorbing material.

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